512 Pixels

Last night, the family and I went to Best Buy.

Now, I usually avoid retail stores as much as possible. Even going to the grocery store is something I dislike. Sadly, I couldn’t escape it last night, but I did come away with some random thoughts.

E-book Readers

The store had the Kindle, the Nook, the Nook Color and Sony’s reader all on display, as well as some models I didn’t recognize. Clearly, the Kindle is the machine to beat. At $139, it was the cheapest contender, and by far the best. The screen is simply wonderful.

Reading on an iPad, laptop or even the Nook (based on last night alone, granted) makes my eyes tired. Maybe it’s the backlight, the glare or something else, but I just don’t enjoy it.

However, the E Ink screen on the Kindle is great. While it’s far more limited than the other products out there — no backlight, no color — it’s perfect for reading.

I think my wife will be getting a graphite Wi-Fi model for her birthday.

Google TV

While it is clear Google TV is in trouble, let me tell you — it really is. Best Buy had the Logitech Revue and Sony’s Internet TV on display. Apart from the hardware being laughable, the software is a mess. It feels … janky. Moving between TV and the Internet just feels weird and hobbled-together. The interface is slick looking, but slow at time.

In my 20 minutes of playing with it, I was the only one who touched any of the demo systems. Just sad.

3-D TV

Let me say this now — I don’t own a television. My wife and I have a 24" iMac, and it is our media hub. It gets the job done nicely.

Let me also say this — I just saw my first 3-D movie. It was Tron: Legacy two weeks ago. I didn’t like 3-D at all. Maybe I did it wrong, but I had a headache after seeing Tron. It didn’t add much to the experience of the film, and just felt gimmiky.

I had the same experience watching part of a football game on a 3-D TV at Best Buy. Yes, it’s neat, but it doesn’t add anything for me. Except eye strain. And a set of glasses that makes everyone look like a goober.

However, the 3-D demos drew people in at the store. Several people — including an elderly couple — liked the demo, and spoke highly of the experience.

I just don’t get it.

DVDs

We spent a few minutes checking out the DVD section at the store. Best Buy has always had a great collection of media, but in a world with iTunes, buying physical media just doesn’t make any sense to me. Yes, physical media doesn’t go away if I have a hard drive crash, but I have a sweet backup system in place for my media.

Physical media is pricey. Toy Story 3 was like $20 at Best Buy. I paid $9.99¹ for it this weekend on the iTunes Store.

Best Buy Itself

Best Buy is usually a pretty horrible place. However, the store we visited just opened a few months ago, and all of the staff were helpful and nice. And even clean, which is an improvement over the store’s other locations in Memphis.

While things like Amazon and eBay are great, it is really nice to be able to go and play with devices in real life. That’s something the Internet just can’t pull off.

Check out my newest editorial at Macgasm, outlining the hits and misses of Apple’s year.

This is brilliant. Chewbacca is my favorite.

[via Tumblr Radar]

Dan Frakes:

Put simply, Dropbox is an amazingly useful combination of a Web service and a Mac OS X program that work together to make your data accessible from anywhere and to keep it synchronized between your computers

[…]

If this sounds a bit like the iDisk feature of Apple’s MobileMe service, that’s because it’s similar…except that Dropbox is fast and reliable. Dropbox is also more secure than iDisk, as files stored on the Dropbox servers are encrypted and are transferred using SSL.

Seriously — why is iDisk so bad?

Om Malik:

The iPad didn’t make the cut for the top spot, mostly because of my work rhythms and how I do it. And despite my own early excitement, I have not been able to make it an efficient part of my work flow.

That’s the same dilemma I have.

[ via Ben Brooks]

Several weeks ago, I deleted my Facebook account. Several weeks ago, my life seemed to get a lot better.

Ian Hines recently wrote:

If there are nouns — obligations, people, things, etc. — that you’ve allowed into your life that are holding you back from what you know is important to you, that should raise a red flag. Why are you tolerating those distractions?

To me, Facebook was a huge source of distractions.¹

I totally get that for some people, Facebook allows for communication that they wouldn’t otherwise have. My dad is friends with all of this high school buddies on there, and has re-kindled relationship decades-old.

But I am not one of those people.

I could separate my Facebook friends into two distinct groups:

• People I know — and talk to — in real life.
• People I used to know, but haven’t talked to in years — mostly from high school and college.

See the problem? Facebook didn’t add much value to the relationships I want to have, and added lots of noise in the form of fake relationships with people I don’t care about anymore.

While it may be hard to tell from across the Internet, I am actually an introvert. I can count close friends on one hand, and my other friends with the other. It’s not that I actively dislike people — I just have a difficult time connecting with people in meaningful ways, and trivial connections simply annoy me. I’ve turned avoiding social outings into an art form, and it is something that has frustrated my wife for years. Facebook — from the day it launched at the University of Memphis and I joined — always pressed me out of my comfort zone, but not in a way that was actually helpful.

At this stage in my life, I’m keeping up with who I want to in ways besides Facebook. Reading status messages and seeing photos of people I went to high school with — and barely knew then — are just distractions. And I can’t afford too many distractions.

James Shelley recently wrote about distractions and what conversations should be like:

Let’s say you and I decided to get together for coffee. We set aside an hour at a specific place to meet.

During this conversation I hope to hear and share in your recent, personal experiences. I want to know how you are seeing and feeling the world around you.

But if we vomit every single detail of our lives on each other — that is: what we ate for breakfast; the latest app we installed on our iPhone; our highest score on a mobile game; or detailed every item of our personal schedule since the last time we chatted — we would surely not get around to discussing the deeper nuances of what life has been teaching us. We’d be so hard pressed to squeeze in a play-by-play commentary of our daily doings we might risk being too distracted by minutiae to discuss what we have actually learned and interpreted from our activities.

I think Shelley nails my annoyance with Facebook right on the head.

Since leaving Facebook, there have been a handful of times where I’ve missed it. Usually, the desire sprung up out of boredom — not wanting to see what a random person was up to. Only once have I needed Facebook to contact someone, but my wife had their contact info, so it wasn’t a big deal. Still, I can see how the latter may be an issue in the future.

That said, I don’t miss it. Since leaving, I’ve communicated far more over email and the phone. I’ve met more people for breakfast and lunch to catch up. While my overall number interactions with other people is down, those interactions have been far more meaningful.

And that’s what I need more than distractions.

Andy Ihnatko:

We tend to forgive the features that Apple left behind, though. We’re confident that Apple will get around to it in time. It’s like loaning money. We understand that there’s a risk in giving Apple our $499, but the company is a good credit risk and we’re confident that within 12 months they’ll give us a feature that they never outright promised to deliver.

Lovely. The danger there is that we might someday accept all of this as normal. It isn’t. Our expectations should always be high and should never lose our ability to feel a sense of disappointment.

Nick Bilton:

So what happened to the year of the tablet? The answer is simple: the iPad. Apple offered a slatelike computer that incorporated its perfected iTunes app experience, at the right price point, and with an intuitive interface that helped the company quickly sell millions of its newfangled device.

As we move into 2011, the murmurs coming out of the next Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas all have to do with tablets again. There will be Microsoft tablets, Hewlett-Packard slates and a number of devices running the Google Android platform. All hope to take on Apple. And so we’re looking at another Year of the Tablet.

I think it will be another Year of the iPad, but that’s just me.

Merry Christmas, dear readers.

Mark Gurman at 9 to 5 Mac:

A 13 year-old iPhone user will be going to court against Apple Korea next month over an iPhone 3G repair dispute. Back in October of this year the 13 year-old’s father asked for $251 in compensation from Apple after they refused to fix his daughter’s iPhone 3G, despite the one year warranty. Apple claimed they could not fix his daughter’s iPhone for free as it apparently had water damage, according to the trivial water sensors, which the family denied causing. After this, an attorney for Apple’s Korean front attempted to settle with the family under the table in exchange for the family keeping quiet and not speaking of the incident to the press.

Gurman has a quote from the kid’s dad, Lee Chul-ho:

Although we filed the suit to receive the repair fees, the ultimate purpose of the suit was aimed at demanding that Apple improve its service policy so that people facing similar situations can get back unjustly paid repair expenses. There is no point of raising the suit if only one individual gets compensation.

This isn’t the first time Apple has been sued by someone over this issue. Earlier this year, a California woman opened a class-action lawsuit against the company after claiming she had know idea how her phone’s liquid indicators were tripped.

Here is a section from Apple’s document on the issue:

These indicators will be activated when they come in direct contact with water or a liquid containing water. They are designed not to be triggered by humidity and temperature changes that are within the product’s environmental requirements described by Apple.

These liquid indicators are from “trivial,” however, as Gurman¹ suggests — from my experience, it takes actual liquid to trip them. There was a report out earlier this year stating something as simple as a temperature change could trip the sensors, but that report seems to be an outlier, and doesn’t fit into what I saw first-hand at Apple. Also, if Apple knew the sensors could be tripped by something as simple as cold air, why would they give thousands of customers each year bad news?

That said, Apple recently changed its policy to be more favorable to iPod users. Zach Epstein at Boy Genius Report:

Previously, the presence of an activated LCI within the headphone jack was cause enough for employees to state that an iPod may have been damaged by water or another liquid. Now, employees must first inspect the iPod for other signs of liquid damage before reaching that conclusion. It is currently not known if the new policy applies to iPhone models as well.

It is unclear if iPhone customers get the same benefit of the doubt, as Apple hasn’t publicly altered their policy.

Everybody lies. Teenagers do it more that most. My money is on that this Korean kid accidentally got her iPhone wet and didn’t want to get in trouble. In my years behind a Genius Bar, I saw tons of people claim they didn’t know how their devices’ liquid indicators got tripped. This Korean kid is no different.

Well, the desk I have been building with my dad has graduated from the garage. While we are going to finish it — paint the base, stain the top — once it is warm outside in the spring, the glass and trim work is complete.

It makes my 24" iMac look tiny.

Be sure to check out my piece over at Macgasm, in which I discuss Intel, ARM, Android, Apple and the Newton. All at once.